The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Wideband wireless access technologies are currently under flourishing development, and the technologies of using wireless resources for wideband metropolitan area access are of vitality and enjoy a market share. The wireless spectrum resources are rather precious, and especially in a region that has not been planned well or a License-Exempt Band (LE Band), it tends to be required that a plurality of base stations operate over the same channel, which may result in mutual interference within a system to which they belong. In order to accommodate coexistence of respective devices, particularly LE Band devices, or devices experiencing no network frequency planning, under the same frequency band, there is a need for establishing a coexistence mechanism between the devices.
Neighbor Base Stations (Neighbor BSs) as used in the context refer to base stations sharing a common coverage area in which there is an active terminal. As illustrated in FIG. 1, an asterisk indicates a location where an active terminal is positioned. Although BS1 and BS 2 are geographically close to each other, and one is within a coverage area of the other and vice versa, they are not neighbor base stations because there is no terminal within their common coverage area, thus resulting in no serious interference to wireless network of the opposite party. Although BS2 and BS3 have a small overlapping area, and neither of them is within a coverage area of the other, they are called neighbor base stations in the context because there is an active terminal within the overlapping coverage area, thus resulting in interference to the wireless network of the opposite party.
A community as used in the context refers to a set of base stations in the same environment, and a subset consisted of any one or some of the base stations within the community shares a common coverage area with at least one base station which is within the community but does not belong to the subset. As illustrated in FIG. 2, BS1, BS2, BS3, and BS 4 together constitute a community C1. BS5 and BS3 have an overlapping coverage area in which there is no active terminal, so BS5 does not belong to the community C1, but constitutes solely a community C2. BS6 and BS7 do not belong to the community C1, and constitute another community C3.
A neighbor relationship table can represent a complete record of neighbor relationships within a community, showing whether each base station is a neighbor of another base station, and thus can reflect a network topology of the community. Rows and columns of the table are ordered identically, for instance, they are both arranged according to a descending sequence of numbers of neighbor base stations. Values in the neighbor relationship table constitute a symmetric matrix, and for each element, the value of 0 indicates that two base stations in the corresponding row and column are not neighbor base stations, and the value of 1 indicates that the corresponding two base stations are neighbor base stations. Table 1 illustrates an example of the neighbor relationship table, and the numbers of neighbor base stations of the respective base stations BS1, BS2 . . . are decremented in order.
TABLE 1Neighbor Relationship TableBS IDBS1BS2. . .BSnBS110/1. . .0/1BS20/11. . .0/1. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .BSn0/10/1. . .1
All base stations within a community share the same limited spectrum resource. For any base station being a member of the community, its operating frequency cannot be selected arbitrarily, and shall be planed as a whole, especially in the case of a large scale community. This relates to whether the spectrum resource can be utilized efficiently and fully, and further influences performances of the base stations and the community.
In various existing network planning methods, a static frequency configuration is employed for base stations, so that a maximum number of base stations in a community can operate in different frequency bands. Such a method supports no dynamic configuration, and thus it is difficult for carriers to cooperate with each other. Upon any change of a network, base stations can not tune or negotiate automatically, and the network has to be re-planned, thus resulting in a low efficiency.